Nancy Pelosi’s losing Democratic Confederacy

WASHINGTON, June 23, 2017 — The young mayor of Richmond, Virginia, Levar Stoney, told the Washington Post he has a plan to address the tortured history of his city.

Richmond’s Democratic Mayor Levar Stoney.

“The young African American mayor of the onetime capital of the Confederacy vowed Thursday to confront his city’s towering tributes to Southern Civil War figures with words instead of wrecking balls,” said the Post.

Stoney’s virtue signaling may work in sleepy Richmond, but the tactic isn’t all that persuasive elsewhere in the country.

Deep-pocket Democratic contributors are finding that money doesn’t do much talking in today’s America. Hillary Clinton and her political action committees spent $1.2 billion in their failed effort to win the White House.

Fat-cat support for Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff, defeated on Tuesday by Republican Karen Handel in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, proved ineffective despite outspending his GOP challenger seven to one, making it the most expensive congressional race in U.S. history.

Among the Democratic contributors piling cash into Ossoff’s $30 million political war chest were actors Sam Waterston, Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange and favorite Trump foil and Hollywood D-lister, Rosie O’Donnell.

A headline on CNN’s website asked mournfully, “Democrats just went 0-4. When will they win?”

New York Representative Kathleen Rice.

On MSNBC, Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., said it’s time for a change if Democrats are to have a sliver of electoral hope:

“It’s very clear we need leadership change. There’s no question about it. You know, I sat in a meeting the other day and I listened to a rational as to how we should be happy as a caucus because we didn’t lose as badly … But we’re still losing. And that’s my concern. We need to find a different path, we need to have a vision. Where do we want to go? And we need to have a message … Nancy Pelosi was a great Speaker. She is a great leader. But her time has come and gone.”

According to Politico, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told her party’s congressional caucus that the defeated Ossoff was “a candidate who was young and enthusiastic, and attracted national support.”

Nancy Pelosi downplays Democratic losses in four special congressional elections during news conference.

He just failed to garner a winning majority in the district where he ran for Congress.

Pelosi downplayed Republican House gains as “Pyrrhic victories,” hoping to blunt growing talk of her ouster from the Democratic leadership by heaping praise upon her head for the benefit of Washington reporters, describing herself as a “master legislator” and “strategic, politically astute leader.”

President Trump gave Pelosi some helpful advice via Twitter:

“Democrats would do much better as a party if they got together with Republicans on Healthcare, Tax Cuts, Security. Obstruction doesn’t work!”

Or maybe they can join Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney in his war against bronze monuments honoring Confederates of years past.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia.

It’s worth noting that in the presidential election of 1868, former Confederate commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, wrote a letter endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour against his Civil War nemesis and Republican candidate for president, Ulysses S. Grant.

Lee believed the Democratic Party stood with Southern whites that were “inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hand of the negro race … at present, the negros have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.”

Perhaps Richmond’s Mayor Levar Stoney can help his political party discover, in the words of New York Rep. Kathleen Rice, a “different path … a vision.”

To that end, he will establish a 10-member commission “to study ways to add context to the city’s public memorials to the Confederacy,” said the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

President John F. Kennedy receives a Confederate flag from South Carolina Governor Earnest “Fritz” Hollings in 1961.

A historical “context” that may at long last recognize the Democratic Party’s past evils and compel it to abandon policies that use government power as a lash against those it considers inferior and incapable of self-government: free and independent Americans.